With the explosive proliferation of IP-enabled mobile and fixed devices capable of offering Web, telecom and entertainment services, such as 3G/4G-enabled smart phones, TVs, home appliances, gaming consoles, and automobiles, among others, operators of mobile, broadband and fixed networks are faced with the operational and business challenges of delivering innovative IP-based communication services with maximum profitability. In order to achieve this goal, customers are increasingly migrating away from expensive, closed, proprietary and application-specific legacy platforms, and towards low-cost, open, standards-based unified converged application platforms, which dramatically lower the time and cost of adding new features and extensions to existing IP-based communication services.
Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is a control (signaling) protocol developed to manage interactive multimedia IP sessions including IP telephony, presence, and instant messaging. SIP is widely used in telecommunication networks. SIP and other communications centric protocols are complex, and their implementation requires significant domain expertise. However, SIP is not readily compatible with HTTP and use in the Internet domain.
The IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) is an architecture for an integrated network of telecommunications carriers that would facilitate the use of IP (Internet Protocol) for packet communications in all known forms over wireless or landline. Examples of such packet communications include traditional telephony, fax, e-mail, Voice over IP (VoIP), instant messaging (IM), videoconference sessions and video on demand (VoD). IMS uses a Voice-over-IP (VoIP) and runs over the standard Internet Protocol (IP). IMS gives network operators and service providers the ability to control and charge for each service. IMS architecture has the capability to support existing phone systems (both packet-switched and circuit-switched). Thus, IMS provides the interoperability, security, session management and QoS capabilities that telecommunications providers lack and desire. IMS is the de facto standard for next-generation networks.
HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is the main markup language for creating Web pages and other information that can be displayed in a Web browser. HTML is written in the form of HTML elements consisting of tags. HTML elements form the building blocks of all websites. HTML allows images and objects to be embedded and can be used to create interactive forms. It provides a means to create structured documents by denoting structural semantics for text such as headings, paragraphs, lists, links, quotes and other items. It can embed scripts written in languages such as JavaScript which affect the behavior of HTML web pages. The purpose of a web browser is to read HTML documents and compose them into visible or audible web pages. The HTML environment has a well known behavior according to standards established by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) which is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web (abbreviated WWW or W3).
HTML5 introduced WebRTC application programming interfaces (APIs) that make it possible for applications that use JavaScript in an HTML5 environment to take part in real-time communications. To make use of this capability, applications that reside in the browser environment of one user need to exchange messages with another application to establish media connections. However, the signaling process of exchanging and negotiating session information is not specified by W3C and is left to the application to implement. After obtaining the local media streams, the applications therefore need to use their own logic to exchange the session description protocol (SDP) information between two HTML5 enabled environments. Once the SDP information is exchanged, the applications then use their own logic to pass each other media descriptions to the respective PeerConnection objects so that the media channel can be established. For non-media communication that does not need to use media channels, the application also requires custom logic. Accordingly when using the available WebRTC APIs, application developers are required to write significant boilerplate logic to establish and implement real time communication. The problem is more complicated if it is desired to make a connection with a non-browser media endpoint like a traditional telephony equipment.
It would be desirable to access the network services available in the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) from the HTML environment, and in particular, the HTML environments capable of real-time communication, for example HTML5. However extending IMS architecture to the HTML environment is difficult owing to incompatibility of SIP with HTTP over TCP/IP and the requirement for domain expertise to overcome such incompatibility. There is presently no simple way to extend the network services of the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) to HTML5 applications without radical changes to the IMS model and custom extensions to the HTML platform to permit a browser to be used as an endpoint for IMS services. Thus, despite the desire to extend the enhanced capabilities that IMS provides to the HTML environment, such integration has not been readily feasible.
It would therefore be desirable to provide a system and method for extending IMS architecture to the HTML environment which is effective and simple to implement.
It would further be desirable to provide a system and method for extending IMS architecture to the HTML environment without radical changes to the IMS model or custom extensions to the HTML platform.
It would further be desirable to provide a system and method for extending IMS architecture to the HTML environment which can be implemented without domain expertise.
It would further be desirable to provide extensible functionality to simplify implementation of the real-time communication in Web applications.